Mediagazer: Cord-Cutting Study Comes Down as Cable Nets Cry Foul (Michael O'Connell/Hollywood Reporter)

6:50 AM ET, January 23, 2014

Top News:

Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:

Netflix Beats Analyst Expectations With 2.3M New Domestic Subscribers, Earnings Of 79 Cents A Share — Netflix just announced its fourth-quarter financial results, with the company beating analyst expectations. For the last three months, Netflix reported earnings of 79 cents per share on revenues of $1.175 billion.

Discussion: Forbes, Home Media Magazine, ZDNet, Reuters and MarketWatch

Chris Welch / The Verge:

Netflix's momentum continues with 2.33 million new US customers in Q4 — Netflix revealed its fourth quarter earnings today, capping off a banner year that saw the streaming service surpass HBO in subscriber count and earn critical acclaim for its original programming.

Discussion: Guardian, The Wrap, Bloomberg, @timjhanrahan, @microfundy, @ceciliakang, BuzzFeed, Mashable, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Hollywood Reporter and Wall Street Journal

Peter Kafka / Re/code:
Netflix Says It Will Be Fine Without Net Neutrality Rules

Discussion: CNNMoney.com, Forbes, ReadWrite, Quartz and TechCrunch

Todd Spangler / Variety:
Netflix Plans ‘Substantial’ European Expansion in 2014

Discussion: Pocket-lint

Associated Press:

AP severs ties with photographer who altered work — NEW YORK (AP) — The Associated Press has severed ties with a freelance photographer who it says violated its ethical standards by altering a photo he took while covering the war in Syria in 2013. — The news service said Wednesday …

Discussion: THE DEFINITIVE SOURCE, Politico, Press Gazette, BAGnewsNotes, Associated Press, The Wire, photoblog.nbcnews.com and BuzzFeed

Marina Walker Guevara / The Global Muckraker:

How a multinational journalism team investigated the offshore holdings of China's elite — How we did Offshore Leaks China — A multinational team of journalists spent months combing through secret tax haven records revealing offshore holdings of China's rich and powerful.

Discussion: New York Times, Poynter, icij.org, @icijorg, Bloomberg, Guardian and BBC

Michael O'Connell / Hollywood Reporter:

Cord-Cutting Study Comes Down as Cable Nets Cry Foul — HBO, Showtime and Starz release stats on subscriber growth after a NPD Group study, no longer on the firm's website, claims households with premium cable are on the decline. — Within a day of research firm NPD Group releasing its State …

Discussion: Capital New York, New York Times and The Wrap

TIME:
HBO and Showtime Strike Back: Subscriptions Aren't Actually Down

Discussion: BGR, WebProNews, Los Angeles Times and The Verge

Roberto Baldwin / Wired:

Tivo Lays Off Most of Its Design Team as It Transitions to the Cloud — Update: Tivo says it will continue to use third-party designers for hardware going forward. The article has been updated to reflect this fact. — Tivo has been bullish lately about releasing new software products beyond its core DVR boxes.

Discussion: TIME, Electronista, Engadget, The Verge, Gigaom, @mccarron, Pocket-lint, Business Insider and ParisLemon

John Cassidy / The New Yorker Blog:

Maybe Ezra Klein and Jeff Bezos Are Both Right — The rumors were true: Ezra Klein, the creator of the Washington Post's Wonkblog, is leaving the paper to start a new venture with a couple of his colleagues. In my bit of the Twitterverse, the general reaction appears to be that Jeff Bezos …

Discussion: Columbia Journalism Review, @murraymatt, @gregorydjohnsen, @jtes, @joshuafoust, @tnyjohncassidy, Mediaite, Capital New York, LA Observed and American Spectator

Mike Isaac / Re/code:

With Trove, Ex-WaPo Labs Team Takes Another Try at Social Reading — How do you get your daily news? — It's a question that any 21st century news organization is asking itself — a question all too familiar for a guy like Vijay Ravindran. As the chief digital officer of Graham Holdings …

Discussion: cnbc.com and Washington Post

Mathew Ingram / Gigaom:
The news curation game gets another entrant as the WaPo's former owner relaunches Trove

Discussion: NYT Bits, Business Insider, PandoDaily, Mashable, @niemanlab, The Verge, TechCrunch, @lheron and @mims, Thanks:@mathewi

Jay Rosen / Pressthink:

Grantland's editorial failure with Dr. V story is best argument yet for diversity in newsrooms — Joy's Law for journalism — “Events by which 'Dr. V's Magical Putter' came to be published are now the best argument I have for you on diversity in the newsroom. Here is what can happen when you are not diverse enough.

Discussion: Poynter, The Atlantic Online, The Huffington Post, Gawker, @jayrosen_nyu, @stevesilberman, @zeynep and Kirk LaPointe's …

Sam Kirkland / Poynter:

As CNN mobile traffic hits 40%, editor calls web vs. apps debate ‘red herring’ — CNN announced last week that mobile page views accounted for 40 percent of its overall traffic, the result of equally emphasizing its mobile website and mobile apps even as some in the industry remain stuck in an either-or debate.

Discussion: INMA

Mike Giglio / BuzzFeed:

Syria Citizen-Journalists Come To Switzerland To Cover Peace Talks, Get Attacked By Assad Supporters — Citizen-journalists, who have helped to show the world Syria's war, are now covering the peace conference in Switzerland.They're still getting used to the idea of being so close to the regime …

Sam Petulla / The Content Strategist:

An Interview With Jay Rosen on the Future of Native — A few days before Christmas, one of the smartest minds in journalism tweeted one of the most intriguing definitions of native advertising we've seen. — Rosen, a renowned NYU journalism professor and author of the PressThink blog, sparked a lively debate with the tweet.

Discussion: @raju, AdExchanger and Re/code

Jack Marshall / Digiday:

The Rise of the Publisher Trading Desk — Major publishers have accepted that programmatic advertising is here to stay, and most now sell significant portions of their ad space that way. Now a handful are taking their ad tech experiments a step further, using it to buy inventory …

Los Angeles Times:

Sony Pictures lays off employees in technology group, including leader — Sony Pictures Entertainment headquarters. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times) — Sony Pictures Entertainment has laid off an undisclosed number of people from its Sony Pictures Technologies group, including the unit's president, Chris Cookson.

Discussion: Variety, Bloomberg and Hollywood Reporter

Tom Engelhardt / Tom Dispatch:

The Golden Age of Journalism? — It was 1949. My mother — known in the gossip columns of that era as “New York's girl caricaturist” — was freelancing theatrical sketches to a number of New York's newspapers and magazines, including the Brooklyn Eagle. That paper, then more than a century old …

Discussion: Guardian

Heather Murphy / The Lede:

Targeted text message sends chills to protesters and journalists in Ukraine — Ominous Text Message Sent to Protesters in Kiev Sends Chills Around the Internet — As my colleague Andrew Kramer reported, protesters and journalists standing in the vicinity of fighting between the riot police …

Discussion: TechCrunch, @mattbuchanan, The Independent, @crimethinc, Techdirt, Gawker, The Verge and Mashable

John Paul Titlow / Co.Labs:

Under The Hood Of The New NYTimes.com — For media companies, the pace of technological change can be unforgiving. The New York Times, well-staffed as it may be, is no exception. To meet rapidly changing business goals and reader expectations, the tech team there recently pulled off …

Discussion: @remmons

Sam Thielman / Adweek:

Viacom's Branded Content Play Is the Latest Among Cable Giants — Viacom is doing at scale something that TV entertainment companies—especially those with a wide footprint in the unscripted world—are treating like the advertising success of the future: It's creating a full division devoted to branded content.

Discussion: Variety and Broadcasting & Cable

Rebecca Bowe / sfbg.com:

San Francisco Bay Guardian launches tool for anonymous submissions powered by SecureDrop — Hey whistleblowers — We want your leaks! — rebecca@sfbg.com — The San Francisco Bay Guardian newsroom is tapping some high-tech tools to continue its journalistic mission.

Discussion: @xor

Maria Konnikova / The New Yorker Blog:

The Six Things That Make Stories Go Viral Will Amaze, and Maybe Infuriate, You — When Jonah Berger was a graduate student at Stanford, in the early aughts, he would make a habit of reading page A2 of the Wall Street Journal, which included a list of the five most-read and the five most-shared articles of the day.

Discussion: @alisonhallett, Gothamist, @millie, @actualkris, @brainpicker, @10000words, @mathewi and @utlibraries

Sarah Marshall:

News in your pocket: Mobile-first journalism at WSJ — In one of the sessions at DJ@DJ, a Wall Street Journal training course which I dropped into when I was at head office in New York last week, Neal Mann talked through developments in mobile at the Journal and beyond. — Mobile video

Dominic Ponsford / Press Gazette:

UK sports show bans mentions of Twitter in protest over abusive tweets directed at presenter — Talksport bans Twitter in protest at racist taunts and death threats for Stan Collymore — Talksport has banned mentions of Twitter from its radio station and from Sport magazine until …